Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
II
Google AdWords and Your Blog
Google has a program called AdWords that is a very effective—but also expensive—way to drive
traffic. It's good for all bloggers to understand AdWords, but only good for the most commercially
oriented of us to use it.
AdWords places text-based ads in the right sidebar of search results, and sometimes above them.
AdWords advertisers pay for these ads, but only pay when the ad is actually clicked on. Google
has done a marvelous job of making it easy to advertise using AdWords, easy to pay for your ads,
and relatively easy to get traffic that you can actually monetize (that word again).
A friend of one of the authors (Smith) has a business selling topics about and teaching accent
reduction in London, England. She uses Google AdWords to get students for monthly classes of
language learners.
She pays a few pounds a day (a pound is about $1.60 in U.S. currency at this writing) for about ten
clicks on ads that appear based on search words such as
accent
,
pronunciation
, and
elocution
.
These ads draw potential students to her website, from which they might call her to sign up for
courses.
About half of the students for the classes come in through AdWords, making it a vital contributor
to her business. Few bloggers can make as direct a connection between Google search and
revenues as this. If you can, though, AdWords is worth looking into.
Top Posts and Pages
The Top Posts and Pages link allows you to compare your blog posts, as well as pages on your site,
to see how much traffic they get. This is a great way to see which of your words of wit have
received the most attention and traffic.
Figure 8.8 shows the Top Posts page for Google Voice Daily. You can see that one post got nearly
half of all the views for the site. This is the one that the author (Smith) did the most marketing for,
as described earlier, and that was related to a hot topic of the time.
To see detailed views information for a post, just click on the little chart icon next to it. A graph like
the one in Figure 8.9 will appear. Note that the example in Figure 8.9 shows not only onsite views
but
syndicated views
as well—views by people who read an RSS feed for the post. There were very
few syndicated views for this particular post, but this is clearly something that could be built up.
If you have the time and interest, you can cross-correlate views of a particular post with search
engine terms, referrals, comments, and possibly even with ratings by yourself or others of the qual-
ity of your posts. This kind of analysis is a powerful tool for improving the attractiveness of your
blog to visitors, and can result in a virtuous circle of improved posts, more referrals, more search
engine hits, higher ratings, and more visits, both regular and casual.
Clicks
Looking at clicks in your blog is the reverse of all your other stats. The other stats look at traffic
into
your blog; clicks looks at traffic going
out
, or from one place in your blog to another.
